[Illustration]
[Illustration: “I Beg Your Pardon. Is This a Private Raft?”]
The Beauty and the Bolshevist
By ALICE DUER MILLER
_Author of_ “_The Charm School_” “_Ladies must Live_” “_Come out of the
Kitchen_” _etc_.
Illustrated
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
Printed in the United States of America
Published October, 1920
ILLUSTRATIONS
“I beg your pardon. Is this a private raft?”
“Mr. Moreton, the Newport boat leaves at five-thirty”
“I’ll be there in five minutes, in a little blue car”
“Suppose you find you do hate being poor?”
CONTENTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter I
The editor of that much-abused New York daily, _Liberty_, pushed back
his editorial typewriter and opened one letter in the pile which the
office-boy—no respecter of persons—had just laid upon the desk while
whistling a piercing tune between his teeth.
The letter said:
DEAR BEN,—I hate to think what your feelings will be on learning that I
am engaged to be married to a daughter of the capitalistic class. Try
to overcome your prejudices, however, and judge Eugenia as an
individual and not as a member of a class. She has very liberal ideas,
reads your paper, and is content to go with me to Monroe College and
lead the life of an instructor’s wife. You will be glad to know that
Mr. Cord disapproves as much as you do, and will not give his daughter
a cent, so that our life will be as hard on the physical side as you in
your most affectionate moments could desire. Mr. Cord is under the
impression that lack of an income will cool my ardor. You see he could
not think worse of me if he were my own brother.
Yours,
DAVID.
The fine face of the editor darkened. It was the face of an
idealist—the deep-set, slowly changing eyes, the high cheek bones, but
the mouth closed firmly, almost obstinately, and contradicted the rest
of the face with a touch of aggressiveness, just as in Lincoln’s face
the dreamer was contradicted by the shrewd, practical mouth. He crossed
his arms above the elbow so that one long hand dangled on one side of
his knees and one on the other—a favorite pose of his—and sat thinking.
The editor was often called a Bolshevist—as who is not in these days?
For language is given us not only to conceal thought, but often to
prevent it, and every now and then when the problems of the world
become too complex and too vital, some one stops all thought on a
subject by inventing a tag, like “witch” in the seventeenth century, or
“Bolshevist” in the twentieth.
Ben Moreton was not a Bolshevist; indeed, he had written several
editorials to show that, in his opinion, their doctrines were not
sound, but of course the people who denounced him never thought of
reading his paper. He was a socialist, a believer in government
ownership, and, however equably he attempted to examine any dispute
between capital and labor, he always found for labor. He was much
denounced by ultraconservatives, and perhaps their instinct was sound,
for he was educated, determined, and possessed of a personality that
attached people warmly, so that he was more dangerous than those whose
doctrines were more militant. He was not wholly trusted by the extreme
radicals. His views were not consistently agreeable to either group.
For instance, he believed that the conscientious objectors were really
conscientious, a creed for which many people thought he ought to be
deported. On the other hand, he doubted that Wall Street had started
the war for its own purposes, a skepticism which made some of his
friends think him just fit for a bomb.
The great problem of his life was how to hold together a body of
liberals so that they could be effective. This problem was going to be
immensely complicated by the marriage of his brother with the daughter
of a conspicuous capitalist like William Cord.
He pushed the buzzer on his desk and wrote out the following telegram:
David Moreton, Care William Cord, Newport, R.I.
Am taking boat Newport to-night. Meet me.
Ben.
No one answered his buzzer, but presently a boy came in collecting
copy, and Moreton said to him:
“Here, get this sent, and ask Klein to come here. He’s in the composing
room.”
And presently Mr. Klein entered, in the characteristic dress of the
newspaper man—namely, shirt sleeves and a green shade over his eyes.
“Look here, Ben!” he exclaimed in some excitement. “Here’s a
thousand-dollar check just come in for the strike fund. How’s that for
the second day?”
“Good enough,” said Ben, who would ordinarily have put in a good hour
rejoicing over such unexpected good fortune, but whose mind was now on
other things. “I have to go out of town to-night. You’ll be here, won’t
you, to lock the presses? And, see here, Leo, what is the matter with
our book page?”
“Pretty rotten page,” replied Klein.
“I should say it was—all about taxes and strikes and economic crises. I
told Green never to touch those things in the book reviews. Our readers
get all they want of that from us in the news and the
editorials—hotter, better stuff, too. I’ve told him not to touch ’em in
the book page, and he runs nothing else. He ought to be beautiful—ought
to talk about fairies, and poetry, and twelfth-century art. What’s the
matter with him?”
“He doesn’t know anything,” said Klein. “That’s his trouble. He’s
clever, but he doesn’t know much. I guess he only began to read books a
couple years ago. They excite him too much. He wouldn’t read a fairy
story. He’d think he was wasting time.”
“Get some one to help him out.”
“Who’d I get?”
“Look about. I’ve got to go home and pack a bag. Ask Miss Cox what time
that Newport boat leaves.”
“Newport! Great heavens, Ben! What is this? A little week-end?”
“A little weak brother, Leo.”
“David in trouble again?”
Moreton nodded. “He thinks he’s going to marry William Cord’s
daughter.”
Klein, who was Ben’s friend as well as his assistant, blanched at the
name.
“Cord’s daughter!” he exclaimed, and if he had said Jack-the-ripper’s,
he could not have expressed more horror. “Now isn’t it queer,” he went
on, musingly, “that David, brought up as he has been, can see anything
to attract him in a girl like that?”
Ben was tidying his desk preparatory to departure—that is to say, he
was pushing all the papers far enough back to enable him to close the
roller top, and he answered, absently:
“Oh, I suppose they’re all pretty much the same—girls.”
“Why, what do you mean?” said Leo, reproachfully. “How can a girl who’s
been brought up to be a parasite—to display the wealth of her father
and husband, and has never done a useful thing since she was born—Why,
a woman was telling me the other day—I got caught in a block in the
subway and she was next me—awfully interesting, she was. She sewed in
one of these fashionable dressmaking establishments—and the things she
told me about what those women spend on their clothes—underclothes and
furs and everything. Now there must be something wrong with a woman who
can spend money on those things when she knows the agony of poverty
right around her. You can’t compare that sort of woman with a
self-respecting, self-supporting girl—”
At this moment the door opened and Miss Cox entered. She wore a
short-sleeved, low-neck, pink-satin blouse, a white-satin skirt,
open-work stockings, and slippers so high in the heels that her ankles
turned inward. Her hair was treated with henna and piled untidily on
the top of her head. She was exactly what Klein had described—a
self-respecting, self-supporting girl, but, on a superficial
acquaintance, men of Cord’s group would have thought quite as badly of
her as Klein did of fashionable women. They would have been mistaken.
Miss Cox supported her mother, and, though only seventeen, denied
herself all forms of enjoyment except dress and an occasional movie.
She was conscientious, hard-working, accurate, and virtuous. She loved
Ben, whom she regarded as wise, beautiful, and generous, but she would
have died rather than have him or anyone know it.
She undulated into the room, dropped one hip lower than the other,
placed her hand upon it and said, with a good deal of enunciation:
“Oh, Mr. Moreton, the Newport boat leaves at five-thirty.”
“Thank you very much, Miss Cox,” said Ben, gravely, and she went out
again.
“It would be a terrible thing for Dave to make a marriage like that,”
Klein went on as soon as she had gone, “getting mixed up with those
fellows. And it would be bad for you, Ben—”
“I don’t mean to get mixed up with them,” said Ben.
“No, I mean having Dave do it. It would kill the paper; it would
endanger your whole position; and as for leadership, you could never
hope—”
[Illustration: “Mr. Moreton, the Newport Boat Leaves at Five-thirty”]
“Now, look here, Leo. You don’t think I can stop my brother’s marrying
because it might be a poor connection for me? The point is that it
wouldn’t be good for Dave—to be a poorly tolerated hanger-on. That’s
why I’m going hot-foot to Newport. And while I’m away do try to do
something about the book page. Get me a culture-hound—get one of these
Pater specialists from Harvard. Or,” he added, with sudden inspiration
when his hand was already on the door, “get a woman—she’d have a sense
of beauty and would know how to jolly Green into agreeing with her.”
And with this the editor was gone.
It was the end of one of those burning weeks in August that New York
often knows. The sun went down as red as blood every evening behind the
Palisades, and before the streets and roofs had ceased to radiate heat
the sun was up again above Long Island Sound, as hot and red as ever.
As Ben went uptown in the Sixth Avenue Elevated he could see pale
children hanging over the railings of fire escapes, and behind them
catch glimpses of dark, crowded rooms which had all the disadvantages
of caves without the coolness. But to-day he was too concentrated on
his own problem to notice.
Since Ben’s sixteenth year his brother David had been dependent on him.
Their father had been professor of economics in a college in that part
of the United States which Easterners describe as the “Middle West.” In
the gay days when muck-raking was at its height Professor Moreton had
lost his chair because he had denounced in his lecture room financial
operations which to-day would be against the law. At that time they
were well thought of, and even practiced by the eminent philanthropist
who had endowed the very chair which Moreton occupied. The trustees
felt that it was unkind and unnecessary to complicate their already
difficult duties by such tactlessness, and their hearts began to turn
against Moreton, as most of our hearts turn against those who make life
too hard for us. Before long they asked him to resign on account of his
age—he was just sixty and extremely vigorous; but immediately
afterward, having been deeply surprised and hurt, he did what Goldsmith
recommends to lovely woman under not dissimilar circumstances—he died.
He left his two young sons—he had married late in life—absolutely
unprovided for. Ben, the elder of the two, was sixteen, and just ready
for college; but he could not give four precious years to an academic
degree. He went to work. With the background of an educated environment
and a very sound knowledge of economic questions, breathed in from his
earliest days, he found a place at once on a new paper—or, rather, on
an old paper just being converted into a new organ of
liberalism—_Liberty_. It was independent in politics, and was supposed
to be independent in economic questions, but by the time Ben worked up
to the editorship it was well recognized to be an anticapitalist sheet.
The salary of its editor, though not large, was sufficient to enable
him to send his younger brother through college, with the result that
David, a little weak, a little self-indulgent, a little—partly through
physical causes—disinclined to effort, was now a poet, a classicist and
an instructor in a fresh-water college. Ben made him an allowance to
enable him to live—the college not thinking this necessary for its
instructors. But during the war Ben had not been able to manage the
allowance, because, to the surprise of many of his friends, Ben had
volunteered early.
Although the reasons for doing this seemed absurdly simple to him, the
decision had been a difficult one. He was a pacifist—saw no virtue in
war whatsoever. He wished to convert others to his opinion—unlike many
reformers who prefer to discuss questions only with those who already
agree with them. He argued that the speeches of a man who had been
through war, or, better still, the posthumous writings of one who has
been killed in war, would have more weight with the public than the
best logic of one who had held aloof. But his radical friends felt that
he was using this argument merely as an excuse for choosing the easy
path of conformity, while the few ultraconservatives who mentioned the
matter at all assumed that he had been drafted against his will.
Afterward, when the war was over and his terrible book, _War_,
appeared, no one was pleased, for the excellent reason that it was
published at a moment when the whole world wanted to forget war
entirely. The pay of a private, however, had not allowed him to
continue David’s allowance, and so David, displaying unusual energy,
had found a job for himself as tutor for the summer to William Cord’s
son. Ben had not quite approved of a life that seemed to him slightly
parasitical, but it was healthy and quiet and, above everything, David
had found it for himself, and initiative was so rare in the younger man
that Ben could not bear to crush it with disapproval.
Increasingly, during the two years he was in France, Ben was displeased
by David’s letters. The Cords were described as kindly, well-educated
people, fond one of another, considerate of the tutor, with
old-fashioned traditions of American liberties. Ben asked himself if he
would have been better pleased if David’s employers had been cruel,
vulgar, and blatant, and found the answer was in the affirmative. It
would, he thought, have been a good deal safer for David’s integrity if
he had not been so comfortable.
For two summers Ben had made no protest, but the third summer, when the
war was over and the allowance again possible, he urged David not to go
back to Newport. David flatly refused to yield. He said he saw no
reason why he should go on taking Ben’s money when this simple way of
earning a full living was open to him. Wasn’t Ben’s whole theory that
everyone should be self-supporting? Why not be consistent?
Ignorant people might imagine that two affectionate brothers could not
quarrel over an issue purely affectionate. But the Moretons did
quarrel—more bitterly than ever before, and that is saying a great
deal. With the extraordinary tenacity of memory that develops under
strong emotion, they each contrived to recall and to mention everything
which the other had done that was wrong, ridiculous, or humiliating
since their earliest days. They parted with the impression on David’s
part that Ben thought him a self-indulgent grafter, and on Ben’s side
that David thought him a bully solely interested in imposing his will
on those unfortunate enough to be dependent on him.
It was after half past four when, having walked up five flights of
stairs, he let himself into his modest flat on the top floor of an
old-fashioned brownstone house. As he opened the door, he called,
“Nora!”
No beautiful partner of a free-love affair appeared, but an elderly
woman in spectacles who had once been Professor Moreton’s cook, and
now, doing all the housework for Ben, contrived to make him so
comfortable that the editor of a more radical paper than his own had
described the flat as “a bourgeois interior.”
“Nora,” said Ben, “put something in my bag for the night—I’m going to
Newport in a few minutes.”
He had expected a flood of questions, for Nora was no looker-on at
life, and he was surprised by her merely observing that she was glad he
was getting away from the heat. The truth was that she knew far more
about David than he did. She had consistently coddled David since his
infancy, and he told her a great deal. Besides, she took care of his
things when he was at Ben’s. She had known of sachets, photographs, and
an engraved locket that he wore on his watch-chain. She was no radical.
She had seen disaster come upon the old professor and attributed it,
not to the narrowness of the trustees, but to the folly of the
professor. She disapproved of most of Ben’s friends, and would have
despised his paper if she ever read it. The only good thing about it in
her estimation was, he seemed to be able “to knock a living out of
it”—a process which Nora regarded with a sort of gay casualness. She
did not blame him for making so little money and thus keeping her
housekeeping cramped, but she never in her own mind doubted that it
would be far better if he had more. The idea that David was about to
marry money seemed to her simply the reward of virtue—her own virtue in
bringing David up so well. She knew that Mr. Cord opposed the marriage,
but she supposed that Ben would arrange all that. She had great
confidence in Ben. Still he was very young, very young, so she gave him
a word of advice as she put his bag into his hand.
“Don’t take any nonsense. Remember you’re every bit as good as they.
Only don’t, for goodness’ sake, Mr. Ben, talk any of your ideas to
them. A rich man like Mr. Cord wouldn’t like that.”
Ben laughed. “How would you like me to bring you home a lovely heiress
of my own?” he said.
She took a thread off his coat. “Only don’t let her come interfering in
my kitchen,” she said, and hurried him away. He had a good deal of
courage, but he had not enough to tell Nora he was going to Newport to
stop her darling’s marriage.
The Newport boat gets to Newport about two o’clock in the morning, and
experienced travelers, if any such choose this method of approach, go
on to Fall River and take a train back to Newport, arriving in time for
a comfortable nine-o’clock breakfast. But Ben was not experienced, and
he supposed that when you took a boat for Newport and reached Newport
the thing to do was to get off the boat.
It had been a wonderful night on the Sound, and Ben had not been to
bed, partly because, applying late on a Friday evening, he had not been
able to get a room, but partly because the moon and the southerly
breeze and the silver shores of Long Island and the red and white
lighthouses had been too beautiful to leave. Besides, he had wanted to
think out carefully what he was going to say to his brother.
To separate a man from the woman he loves, however unwisely, has some
of the same disadvantages as offering a bribe—one respects the other
person less in proportion as one succeeds. What, Ben said to himself,
could he urge against a girl he did not know? Yet, on the other hand,
if he had known her, his objections would have seemed regrettably
personal. Either way, it was difficult to know what to say. He wondered
what Cord had said, and smiled to think that here was one object for
which he and Cord were co-operating—only Cord would never believe it.
That was one trouble with capitalists—they always thought themselves so
damned desirable. And Ben did not stop to inquire how it was that
capitalists had gained this impression.
On the pier he looked about for David, but there was no David. Of
course the boy had overslept, or hadn’t received his telegram—Ben said
this to himself, but somehow the vision of David comfortably asleep in
a luxurious bed in the Cords’s house irritated him.
His meditations were broken in upon by a negro boy with an open hack,
who volunteered to “take him up for fifty cents.” It sounded
reasonable. Ben got in and they moved slowly down the narrow pier, the
horses’ hoofs clumping lazily on the wooden pavement. Turning past the
alley of Thames Street, still alight at three o’clock in the morning,
Ben stopped at the suggestion of his driver and left his bag at a
hotel, and then they went on up the hill, past the tower of the
Skeleton in Armor, past old houses with tall, pillared porticoes,
reminiscent of the days when the South patronized Newport, and turned
into Bellevue Avenue—past shops with names familiar to Fifth Avenue,
past a villa with bright-eyed owls on the gateposts, past many large,
silent houses and walled gardens.
The air was very cool, and now and then the scent of some flowering
bush trailed like a visible cloud across their path. Then suddenly the
whole avenue was full of little red lights, like the garden in “Faust”
when Mephistopheles performs his magic on it. Here and there the huge
headlights of a car shone on the roadway, magnifying every rut in the
asphalt, and bringing out strange, vivid shades in the grass and the
hydrangea bushes. They were passing a frowning palace set on a piece of
velvet turf as small as a pocket handkerchief—so small that the lighted
windows were plainly visible from the road.
“Stop,” said Ben to his driver. He had suddenly realized how long it
must be before he could rouse the Cord household.
He paid his driver, got out, and made his way up the driveway toward
the house. Groups of chauffeurs were standing about their
cars—vigorous, smartly dressed men, young for the most part. Ben
wondered if it were possible that they were content with the present
arrangement, and whether their wives and children were not stifling in
the city at that very moment. He caught a sentence here and there as he
passed. “And, believe me,” one was saying, “as soon as he got into the
box he did not do a thing to that fellar from Tiverton—” Ben’s
footsteps lagged a little. He was a baseball fan. He almost forgave the
chauffeurs for being content. They seemed to him human beings, after
all.
He approached the house, and, walking past a narrow, unroofed piazza,
he found himself opposite a long window. He looked straight into the
ballroom. The ball was a fancy ball—the best of the season. It was
called a Balkan Ball, which gave all the guests the opportunity of
dressing pretty much as they pleased. The wood of the long paneled room
was golden, and softened the light from the crystal appliques along the
wall, and set off the bright dresses of the dancers as a gold bowl sets
off the colors of fruit.
Every now and then people stepped out on the piazza, and as they did
they became audible to Ben for a few seconds. First, two middle-aged
men, solid, bronzed, laughing rather wickedly together. Ben drew back,
afraid of what he might overhear, but it turned out to be no very
guilty secret. “My dear fellow,” one was saying, “I gave him a stroke a
hole, and he’s twenty years younger than I am—well, fifteen anyhow. The
trouble with these young men is that they lack—”
Ben never heard what it was that young men lacked.
Next came a boy and a girl, talking eagerly, the girl’s hand
gesticulating at her round, red lips. Ben had no scruples in
overhearing them—theirs appeared to be the universal secret. But here
again he was wrong. She was saying: “Round and round—not up and down.
My dentist says that if you always brush them round and round—”
Then two young men—boys, with cigarettes drooping from their lips; they
were saying, “I haven’t pitched a game since before the war, but he
said to go in and get that Tiverton fellow, and so—” Ben saw that he
was in the presence of the hero of the late game. He forgave him, too.
As a matter of fact, he had never given the fashionable world enough
attention to hate it. He knew that Leo Klein derived a very revivifying
antagonism from reading about it, and often bought himself an entrance
to the opera partly because he loved music, but partly, Ben always
thought, because he liked to look up at the boxes and hate the
occupants for their jewels and inattention. But Ben watched the
spectacle with as much detachment as he would have watched a spring
dance among the Indians.
And then suddenly his detachment melted away, for a lovely girl came
through the window—lovely with that particular and specific kind of
loveliness which Ben thought of when he used the word—_his_ kind. He
used to wonder afterward how he had known it at that first glimpse,
for, in the dim light of the piazza, he could not see some of her
greatest beauties—the whiteness of her skin, white as milk where her
close, fine, brown hair began, or the blue of the eyes set at an angle
which might have seemed Oriental in eyes less enchanting turquoise in
color. But he could see her slenderness and grace. She was dressed in
clinging blues and greens and she wore a silver turban. She leaned her
hands on the railings—she turned them out along the railings; they were
slender and full of character—not soft. Ben looked at the one nearest
him. With hardly more than a turn of his head he could have kissed it.
The idea appealed to him strongly; he played with it, just as when he
was a child in a college town he had played with the idea of getting up
in church and walking about on the backs of the pews. This would be
pleasanter, and the subsequent getaway even easier. He glanced at the
dark lawn behind him; there appeared to be no obstacle to escape.
Perhaps, under the spell of her attraction for him, and the knowledge
that he would never see her again, he might actually have done it, but
she broke the trance by speaking to a tall, stolid young man who was
with her.
“No, Eddie,” she said, as if answering something he had said some time
ago, “I really was at home, at just the time I said, only this new
butler does hate you so—”
“You might speak to him about it—you might even get rid of him,”
replied the young man, in the tone of one deeply imposed upon.
“Good butlers are so rare nowadays.”
“And are devoted friends so easy to find?”
“No, but a good deal easier than butlers, Eddie dear.”
The young man gave an exclamation of annoyance. “Let us find some place
out of the way. I want to speak to you seriously—” he began, and they
moved out of earshot—presumably to a secluded spot of Eddie’s choosing.
When they had gone Ben felt distinctly lonely, and, what was more
absurd, slighted, as if Eddie had deliberately taken the girl away from
him—out of reach. How silly, he thought, for Eddie to want to talk to
her, when it was so clear the fellow did not know how to talk to her.
How silly to say, in the sulky tone, “Are devoted friends so easy to
find?” Of course they were—for a girl like that—devoted friends,
passionate lovers, and sentimental idiots undoubtedly blocked her path.
It might have been some comfort to him to know that in the remote spot
of his own choosing, a stone bench under a purple beech, Eddie was
simply going from bad to worse.
“Dear Crystal,” he began, with that irritating reasonableness of manner
which implies that the speaker is going to be reasonable for two, “I’ve
been thinking over the situation. I know that you don’t love me, but
then I don’t believe you will ever be deeply in love with any one. I
don’t think you are that kind of woman.”
“Oh, Eddie, how dreadful!”
“I don’t see that at all. Just as well, perhaps. You don’t want to get
yourself into such a position as poor Eugenia.”
“I do, I would. I’d give anything to be as much in love as Eugenia.”
“What? With a fellow like that! A complete outsider.”
“Outside of what? The human race?”
“Well, no,” said Eddie, as if he were yielding a good deal, “but
outside of your traditions and your set.”
“My set! Good for him to be outside of it, I say. What have they ever
done to make anyone want to be inside of it? Why, David is an educated
gentleman. To hear him quote Horace—”
“Horace who?”
“Really, Eddie.”
“Oh, I see. You mean the poet. That’s nothing to laugh at, Crystal. It
was a natural mistake. I thought, of course, you meant some of those
anarchists who want to upset the world.”
Crystal looked at him more honestly and seriously than she had yet
done.
“Well, don’t you think there _is_ something wrong with the present
arrangement of things, Eddie?”
“No, I don’t, and I hate to hear you talk like a socialist.”
“I am a socialist.”
“You’re nothing of the kind.”
“I suppose I know what I am.”
“Not at all—not at all.”
“I certainly think the rich are too rich, while the poor are so
horridly poor.”
“_You’d_ get on well without your maid and your car and your father’s
charge accounts at all the shops, wouldn’t you?”
Though agreeable to talk seriously if you agree, it is correspondingly
dangerous if you disagree. Crystal stood up, trembling with an emotion
which Eddie, although he was rather angry himself, considered utterly
unaccountable.
“Yes,” she said, almost proudly, “I _am_ luxurious, I _am_ dependent on
those things. But whose fault is that? It’s the way I was brought
up—it’s all wrong. But, even though I am dependent on them, I believe I
could exist without them. I’d feel like killing myself if I didn’t
think so. Sometimes I want to go away and find out if I couldn’t live
and be myself without all this background of luxury. But at the
worst—I’m just one girl—suppose I were weak and couldn’t get on without
them? That wouldn’t prove that they are right. I’m not so blinded that
I can’t see that a system by which I profit may still be absolutely
wrong. But you always seem to think, Eddie, that it’s part of the
Constitution of the United States that you should have everything
you’ve always had.”
Eddie rose, too, with the manner of a man who has allowed things to go
far enough. “Look here, my dear girl,” he said, “I am a man and I’m
older than you, and have seen more of the world. I know you don’t mean
any harm, but I must tell you that this is very wicked, dangerous
talk.”
“Dangerous, perhaps, Eddie, but I can’t see how it can be wicked to
want to give up your special privileges.”
“Where in the world do you pick up ideas like this?”
“I inherited them from an English ancestor of mine, who gave up all
that he had when he enlisted in Washington’s army.”
“You got that stuff,” said Eddie, brushing this aside, “from David
Moreton, and that infernal seditious paper his brother edits—and that
white-livered book which I haven’t read against war. I’d like to put
them all in jail.”
“It’s a pity,” said Crystal, “that your side can’t think of a better
argument than putting everyone who disagrees with you in jail.”
With this she turned and left him, and, entering the ballroom, flung
herself into the arms of the first partner she met. It was a timid boy,
who, startled by the eagerness with which she chose him, with her
bright eyes and quickly drawn breath, was just coming to the conclusion
that a lovely, rich, and admired lady, had fallen passionately in love
with him, when with equal suddenness she stepped out of his arms and
was presently driving her small, open car down the avenue.
Under the purple beech Eddie, left alone, sank back on the stone bench
and considered, somewhat as the persecutors of Socrates may have done,
suitable punishments for those who put vile, revolutionary ideas into
the heads of young and lovely women.
In the meantime Ben, who had enjoyed the party more than most of the
invited guests, and far more than the disconsolate Eddie, had left his
vantage point at the window. He had suddenly become aware of a strange
light stealing under the trees, and, looking up, he saw with surprise
that the stars were growing small and the heavens turning
steel-color—in fact, that it was dawn.
Convinced that sunrise was a finer sight than the end of the grandest
ball that ever was given, he made his way down a shabby back lane, and
before long came out on the edge of the cliffs, with the whole panorama
of sunrise over the Atlantic spread out before him.
He stood there a moment, somebody’s close, well-kept lawn under his
feet, and a pale-pink sea sucking in and out on the rocks a hundred
feet below. The same hot, red sun was coming up; there wasn’t a steady
breeze, but cool salt puffs came to him now and then with a breaking
wave. It was going to be a hot day, and Ben liked swimming better than
most things in life. He hesitated.
If he had turned to the left, he would have come presently to a public
beach and would have had his swim conventionally and in due time. But
some impulse told him to turn to the right, and he began to wander
westward along the edge of the cliffs—always on his left hand, space
and the sea, and on his right, lawns or gardens or parapets crowned by
cactus plants in urns, and behind these a great variety of
houses—French chateaux and marble palaces and nice little white
cottages, and, finally, a frowning Gothic castle. All alike seemed
asleep, with empty piazzas and closed shutters, and the only sign of
life he saw in any of them was one pale housemaid shaking a duster out
of a window in an upper gable.
At last he came to a break in the cliffs—a cove, with a beach in it, a
group of buildings obviously bathing-houses. The sacredness of this
pavilion did not occur to Ben; indeed, there was nothing to suggest it.
He entered it light-heartedly and was discouraged to find the door of
every cabin securely locked. The place was utterly deserted. But Ben
was persistent, and presently he detected a bit of a garment hanging
over a door, and, pulling it out, he found himself in possession of a
man’s bathing suit. A little farther on he discovered a telephone room
unlocked. Here he undressed and a minute later was swimming straight
out to sea.
The level rays of the sun were doing to the water just what the
headlights of the motors had done to the road; they were enlarging
every ripple and edging the deep purple-blue with yellow light. Except
for a fishing dory chunking out to its day’s work, Ben had the sea and
land to himself. He felt as if they were all his own, and, for a
socialist, was guilty of the sin of pride of possession. He was
enjoying himself so much that it was a long time before he turned to
swim back.
He was swimming with his head under water most of the time so that he
did not at once notice that a raft he had passed on his way out was now
occupied. As soon as he did see it his head came up. It was a female
figure, and even from a distance he could see that she was unconscious
of his presence and felt quite as sure of having the world to herself
as he was. She was sitting on the edge of the raft, kicking a pair of
the prettiest legs in the world in and out of the water. They were clad
in the thinnest of blue-silk stockings, the same in which a few minutes
before she had been dancing, but not being able to find any others in
her bathhouse, she had just kept them on, recklessly ignoring the
inevitable problem of what she should wear home. She was leaning back
on her straightened arms, with her head back, looking up into the sky
and softly whistling to herself. Ben saw in a second that she was the
girl of the silver turban.
He stole nearer and nearer, cutting silently through the water, and
then, when he had looked his fill, he put his head down again, splashed
a little, and did not look up until his hand was on the raft, when he
allowed an expression of calm surprise to appear on his face.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Is this a private raft?”
The young lady, who had had plenty of time since the splash to arrange
her countenance, looked at him with a blank coldness, and then suddenly
smiled.
“I thought it was a private world,” she replied.
“It’s certainly a very agreeable one,” said Ben, climbing on the raft.
“And what I like particularly about it is the fact that no one is alive
but you and me. Newport appears to be a city of the dead.”
“It always was,” she answered, contemptuously.
“Oh, come. Not an hour ago you were dancing in blue and green and a
silver turban at a party over there,” and he waved his hand in the
direction from which he had come.
“Did you think it was a good ball?”
“I enjoyed it,” he answered, truthfully.
Her face fell. “How very disappointing,” she said. “I didn’t see you
there.”
“Disappointing that you did not see me there?”
“No,” she replied, and then, less positively; “No; I meant it was
disappointing that you were the kind of man who went to parties—and
enjoyed them.”
“It would be silly to go if you didn’t enjoy them,” he returned,
lightly.
She turned to him very seriously. “You’re right,” she said; “it is
silly—very silly, and it’s just what I do. I consider parties like that
the lowest, emptiest form of human entertainment. They’re dull; they’re
expensive; they keep you from doing intelligent things, like studying;
they keep you from doing simple, healthy things, like sleeping and
exercising; they make you artificial; they make you civil to people you
despise—they make women, at least, for we must have partners—”
“But why do you go, then?”
She was silent, and they looked straight and long at each other. Then
she said, gravely:
“The answer’s very humiliating. I go because I haven’t anything else to
do.”
He did not reassure her. “Yes, that’s bad,” he said, after a second.
“But of course you could not expect to have anything else to do when
all your time is taken up like that. ‘When the half gods go,’ you know,
‘the gods arrive.’”
The quotation was not new to Crystal; in fact, she had quoted it to
Eddie not very long before, apropos of another girl to whom he had
shown a mild attention, but it seemed to her as if she took in for the
first time its real meaning. Whether it was the dawn, exhaustion, a
stimulating personality, love, or mere accident, the words now came to
her with all the beauty and truth of a religious conviction. They
seemed to shake her and make her over. She felt as if she could never
be sufficiently grateful to the person who had thus made all life fresh
and new to her.
“Ah,” she said, very gently, “that’s it. I see. You won’t believe me,
but I assure you from now on I mean to be entirely different.”
“Please, not too different.”
“Oh yes, yes, as different as possible. I’ve been so unhappy, and
unhappy about nothing definite—that’s the worst kind, only that I have
not liked the life I was leading.”
She glanced at him appealingly. She had tried to tell this simple story
to so many people, for she had many friends, and yet no one had ever
really understood. Some had told her she was spoiled, more, that there
was no use in trying to change her life because she would soon marry;
most of them had advised her to marry and find out what real trouble
was. Now, as she spoke she saw that this strange young man from the sea
not only understood her discontent, but thought it natural, almost
commonplace.
She poured it all out. “Only the worst thing,” she ended, “is that I’m
not really any good. There isn’t anything else that I know how to do.”
“I doubt that,” he answered, and she began to doubt it, too. “I’m sure
there are lots of things you could do if you put your mind on it. Did
you ever try to write?”
Now, indeed, she felt sure that he was gifted with powers more than
mortal—to have guessed this secret which no one else had ever
suspected. She colored deeply.
“Why, yes,” she answered, “I think I can—a little, only I’ve so little
education.”
“So little education?”
“Yes, I belong to the cultivated classes—three languages and nothing
solid.”
“Well, you know, three languages seem pretty solid to me,” said Ben,
who had wrestled very unsuccessfully with the French tongue. “You speak
three languages, and let me see, you know a good deal about painting
and poetry and jade and Chinese porcelains?”
She shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. “Oh, of course everyone
knows about those things, but what good are they?”
They were a good deal of good to Ben. He pressed on toward his final
goal. “What is your attitude toward fairies?” he asked, and Miss Cox
would have heard in his tone a faint memory of his voice when he
engaged a new office-boy.
Her attitude toward fairies was perfectly satisfactory, and he showed
so much appreciation that she went on and told him her great secret in
full. She had once had something published and been paid money for
it—fifteen dollars—and probably never in her life had she spoken of any
sum with so much respect. It had been, well, a sort of a review of a
new illustrated edition of Hans Andersen’s Tales, treating them as if
they were modern stories, commenting on them from the point of view of
morals and probability—making fun of people who couldn’t give
themselves up to the charm of a story unless it tallied with their own
horrid little experiences of life. She told it, she said, very badly,
but perhaps he could get the idea.
He got it perfectly. “Good,” he said. “I’ll give you a job. I’m a
newspaper editor.”
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “you’re not Mr. Munsey, are you, or Mr. Reid, or
Mr. Ochs?”
Her knowledge of newspaper owners seemed to come to a sudden end.
“No,” he answered, smiling, “nor even Mr. Hearst. I did not say I owned
a newspaper. I edit it. I need some one just like you for my book page,
only you’d have to come to New York and work hard, and there wouldn’t
be very much salary. Can you work?”
“Anyone can.”
“Well, will you?”
“Indeed I will.” (It was a vow.) “And now I must go. I have to drive
myself home in an open car, and the tourists do stare at one so—in
fancy dress.”
“Yes, but when am I to see you again? I leave Newport to-night.”
“Telephone me—2079—and we’ll arrange to do something this afternoon.”
“And whom shall I ask for?”
“Telephone at two-fifteen to the minute, and I’ll answer the telephone
myself.”
She evidently rather enjoyed the mystery of their not knowing each
other’s names. But a black idea occurred to Ben. She had slid off the
raft and swum a few strokes before he shouted to her:
“Look here. Your name isn’t Eugenia, is it?”
She waved her hand. “No, I’m Crystal,” she called back.
“Good-by, Crystal.”
This time she did not wave, but, swimming on her side with long, easy
strokes, she gave him a sweet, reassuring look.
After she had gone he lay down on the raft with his face buried in his
arms. A few moments before he had thought he could never see enough of
the sunrise and the sea, but now he wanted to shut it out in favor of a
much finer spectacle within him. So this was love. Strange that no one
had ever been able to prepare you for it. Strange that poets had never
been able to give you a hint of its stupendous inevitability. He
wondered if all miracles were like that—so simple—so—
Suddenly he heard her voice near him. He lifted his head from his arms.
She was there in the water below him, clinging to the raft with one
hand.
“I just came back to tell you something,” she said. “I thought you
ought to know it before things went any farther.”
He thought, “Good God! she’s in love with some one else!” and the
horror of the idea made him look at her severely.
“I’m not perhaps just as I seem—I mean my views are rather liberal. In
fact”—she brought it out with an effort—“I’m almost a socialist.”
The relief was so great that Ben couldn’t speak. He bent his head and
kissed the hand that had tempted him a few hours before.
She did not resent his action. Her special technique in such matters
was to pretend that such little incidents hardly came into the realm of
her consciousness. She said, “At two-fifteen, then,” and swam away for
good.
Later in the day a gentleman who owned both a bathing house and a
bathing suit on Bailey’s beach was showing the latter possession to a
group of friends.
“No one can tell me that Newport isn’t damp,” he said. “I haven’t been
in bathing for twenty-four hours, and yet I can actually wring the
water out of my suit.”